'The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918'
WR is among the artists to be featured in 'The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London
and New York, 1914–1918', an exhibition which opens at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, in
the USA, in September 2010, and in 2011 travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection,
Venice, and to Tate Britain. The Nasher Museum website describes the exhibition as
follows:
This is the first major exhibition in the United States devoted to the English Vorticist
movement. An abstracted figurative style, combining machine-age forms and the energetic
imagery suggested by a vortex, Vorticism emerged in London at a moment when the staid English art scene had been jolted by the advent of French Cubism and Italian
Futurism. Vorticism was a short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that spanned
the years of the First World War (1914–1918). American expatriate poet Ezra Pound was closely associated with the movement;
other key figures included artist Wyndham Lewis, painters David Bomberg, William
Roberts, Helen Saunders and Edward Wadsworth, and sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska. The exhibition will include some 60 works by these and other artists: paintings,
watercolors and drawings, sculptures and photographs. The exhibition is curated by
Mark Antliff, professor in Duke University's Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and Vivien Greene, associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
It is co-organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice, and Tate Britain in London. The exhibition opens at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, Sept. 30, 2010 – January 2, 2011.
The exhibition will be at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, from 29 January
to 22 May 2011, and at Tate Britain from 22 June to 18 September 2011. The catalogue
will include an article by Andrew Gibbon Williams on Roberts's reaction to the Tate's
1956 exhibition 'Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism', which gave rise to WR's series of Vortex Pamphlets.
Two-step II
–study, c.1915 (The British Museum)
© The Estate of John David Roberts
A Roberts display at Tate Britain?
Some months ago the William Roberts Society was given to understand that Tate Britain
would in 2010 be mounting a display of the works by WR that Tate had obtained from
the estate of Roberts's son, John. (See WR works to go to the Tate.) However, we have been unsuccessful in trying to get more details about this.
Roberts in the saleroom
Two 1974 oils by WR are included in the Bonhams sale of twentieth-century British
art on 17 March. The Pet
has an estimate of £12,000–£16,000, and The Vigilantes is estimated at £18,000–£25,000.
The Pet, 1974
© The Estate of John David Roberts
The Vigilantes, 1974
© The Estate of John David Roberts
On 18 November, in Bonhams' sale of twentieth-century British art, WR's 1935 drawing
Spanish Dancers
was sold for £4,800 (including buyer's premium).
Spanish Dancers, 1935
© The Estate of John David Roberts
On 27 June a new auction record was set for a work by Roberts when Tiroche Auctions
in Israel sold his 1922 painting Brass Balls
(aka Outside the Pawn Shop
and Figures in the Shop) for $368,000. The previous most expensive WR was his Birth of Venus.
Brass Balls, 1922
© The Estate of John David Roberts
On 15 July, in Christie's South Kensington sale of twentieth-century British art,
two works by WR failed to sell. Portrait of a Schoolboy with Braces, probably from around 1930, was estimated at £4,000–£6,000, as was Portrait of a Schoolboy
of a similar date.
In Bloomsbury Auctions' sale of oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints on
2 July, WR's drawing Stretching Man
(aka Standing Figure), dating from about 1920, sold for £2,200.
Stretching Man, c.1920
© The Estate of John David Roberts
Collection of WR images, and requests for others
David Cleall is in the process of updating his listings of Roberts's works. He now
has nearly one thousand recorded images, and his collection of reproductions has
been boosted by Ruth Artmonsky giving him her own considerable collection of copies.
David has now accumulated probably six or seven hundred reproductions of WR's work – surely the most comprehensive collection anywhere. He has been most generous in sharing
his work with others, and Andrew Heard, who organised the acclaimed Roberts retrospective
in 2004, and Andrew Gibbon Williams have acknowledged their debt and gratitude to him.
David would be very grateful if he could be notified of any reproductions of rare
Roberts work via
He is happily surprised that details of pictures previously not recorded are still
emerging from time to time. At the Andrew Gibbon Williams' book launch a guest of
Mishcon de Reya kindly donated two photographs of WR's First World War subjects Walking Wounded
and The Crown and Anchor Board.
Despite their being of great historical and artistic interest, neither of these pictures
has an exhibition history and neither has been reproduced anywhere. The Crown and Anchor Board
depicts a barracks game referred to in Roberts's excellent First World War memoir,
Howitzer Gunner.
Four pictures that David would be particularly interested in acquiring reproductions
of are The Dogs of the Ben Hillal
(a.k.a. Wolves and Men); Susanna and the Elders
and Anthony and Cleopatra
(a.k.a. Anthony in Egypt).
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